Tideways and Xhprof on PHP 7: Beta Testers Wanted

This Thursday the long awaited stable PHP 7 version will be released and it’s hard to hide our excitement about this important day in PHP history. For us the most important change is the performance increase and we have written about two- to threefold improvements across different kinds of applications before.

In August I watched PHPs creator Rasmus Lerdorf at the Free- and Open-Source Conference mentioning just how impressive this PHP 7 achievement is: A completely rewritten engine at the core and yet almost no breaking changes that affect PHP developers.

Just hours away from the release, it shouldn’t suprise you, that we have been working on a Tideways extension with PHP 7 compatibility over the last four months.

We are now ready for additional feedback and release a beta version of the Tideways extension for PHP 7. You can help us test the extension on PHP 7

• if you are a Tideways customer or trial user
• if you are in need of a PHP 7 compatible XHProf replacement.

To get started either compile the extension yourself from the Git Repository using the “php7-only” branch or send us an e-mail to get access to Tarball, Debian or RPMs packages with pre-compiled binaries and installers.

All tests for the extension are passing. Until we can release a productive release we are still trying to compile the extension for both PHP 5 and PHP 7 using the same code basis. Due to the severe changes in the core of Zend Engine this is a tough problem.

If you find bugs please open an issue on the Extension’s issue tracker and we will be working to fix them.